Peter, Deborah top LinkedIn list for most popular CEO names

If you’re a parent and want your son or daughter to grow up to be a chief executive officer, you might want to change their name to Peter or Deborah.

Or if you want your kid to have a good chance of becoming a rich and famous athlete, try Ryan, Matt, Jessica, Matthew or Jason. For law enforcement, it’s Billy, Darrell, Pete, Rodney and Troy. Or if human resources is you’re thing, go with Emma, Katie, Claire, Jennifer or Natalie.

At least, those are the most popular first names in those job categories, according to the social professional network LinkedIn Corp. of Mountain View.

LinkedIn data scientists recently dove into the data banks of its 100 million members around the globe and found the top five most popular first names of male CEOs were, in order: Peter, Bob, Jack, Bruce and Fred.

For women CEOs, it’s Deborah, Sally, Debra, Cynthia and Carolyn.

“We started by contrasting CEOs across the globe with the average LinkedIn professional to find the top names that are over-represented among CEOs,” senior LinkedIn research scientist Monica Rogati wrote in a company blog.

Rogati said one trend that emerged was that popular CEO names “tend to be either short or shortened versions of popular first names. Onomastics specialist Dr. Frank Nuessel suggests that shortened versions of given names are often used to denote a sense of friendliness and openness. Female CEOs, on the other hand, use their full name to project a more professional image.”

To be sure, there’s no scientific explanation for why people with those names have risen to the top.

And it doesn’t explain why Apple Inc. is led by a very famous Steve (Jobs) whose first name isn’t even in LinkedIn’s top five. And where does that leave Larry, as in Oracle’s Ellison and Google’s Page, or Mark, as in Facebook’s Zuckerberg?

Up until a week ago, there was a local CEO named Peter, until Peter Darbee stepped down from the top spot at Pacific Gas & Electric Co.

In Canada, you can call the CEO Ray and you might be right, but “monosyllabic CEO names are also not necessarily popular in all countries,” Rogati said. Rajiv tops the list India, while Wolfgang is number one in Germany. (See LinkedIn’s map below)

Rogati noticed other trends.

“Short, four-letter names are even more popular in sales (Chip, Trey) but not in engineering (Rajesh) or the restaurant industry, where the top over-represented names are Thierry, Philippe and Laurent,” she said.